THE HIGHER REACHES OF THE LOWER ORDERS: A CRITIQUE OF B. F. SKINNER
Spitz, David
A Critique of the Theories of B. F. Skinner There is only one serious question in political philosophy: What manner of men do we take ourselves and others to be? All other issues—not least...
...2) Skinner is not a humanist, for he dehumanizes man...
...As techniques of conditioning are perfected we may expect greater and more effective socialization to take place...
...But let this go for the moment...
...There is always a considerable gap between rhetoric and practice: even those states we label democratic are disfigured by arrangements that hinder or block legitimate access to higher place and power...
...The intriguing questions then are, How closed or open can a closed or open society be if it is to maintain and perpetuate itself...
...Every member has a direct channel through which he may protest to the Managers or even the Planners...
...But while Skinner talks of genetics and physics, what he means by environment is not the biological or physical—which one might suppose are what his theory requires —but the cultural or social...
...The reputable trader may be put out of business by his unscrupulous competitor, the thoughtful statesman be thrust aside by the demagogue...
...No closed society—apart, perhaps, from the extreme caste systems of fiefdoms in an earlier India or the great dynasties of an earlier Asia—has been completely closed...
...What is needed is more control, not less...
...Along with Tocqueville, he feared the increasing pressures of conformity...
...Similarly, we must not mistake the profound appeal of the doctrine of environmental determinism...
...And I put the matter strongly because, if we are to solve the problems that face us in the world today, this concern for mental life must no longer divert our attention from the environmental conditions of which human behavior is a function...
...Yet Skinner does mean to change the world...
...Why not, instead, change the contingencies that will induce the government to behave in different ways—toward their young people or toward the role of the armed forces...
...It must develop or reflect a consensus on values and procedures that "define" it...
...They will "like" it because they will be taught (conditioned) to like it...
...almost always there have been some areas in which men were at least partially free to rise...
...it ill behooves Skinner to recommend their cause...
...And if to these considerations we add the further fact that no moral act makes sense that does not take into account the probable consequences of one's actions, we can see that moral choice is the most taxing, and elevating, demand put upon the individual...
...Problems are not merely many and complex in our chaotic (at least disharmonious) universe...
...He goes on to add, however, that "there is no virtue in accident as such...
...It chooses us...
...1) Clearly, they do not see in that theory and its explanatory account anything markedly different from what they conceive American practices already to be...
...For another, even if we think only of the generality of men, the number and quality of the controllers required to perform the close supervision of the upbringing of children, not to speak of the ongoing behavior of adults, would be simply fantastic...
...In this at least they must be equal...
...How implausible, then, is the extraordinary remark by Skinner's alter ego, the psychologist Frazier in Walden Two: "We simply arrange a world in which serious conflicts occur as seldom as possible or, with a little luck, not at all...
...IvIt is a commonplace that in politics and religion irrational beliefs and conduct are no bar to success...
...creatures of automatic goodness, they behave properly not because they have an awareness of problems and make intelligent choices, but because they have no awareness and make no choices but do as they are required (have been conditioned) to do...
...6—though it should be noted that Kateb's careful and searching analysis, which appeared prior to the publication of Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity, contains the most trenchant criticism of Skinner's views known to me...
...What is distressing about Skinner, who is presumably committed to scientific method, is that he not only claims to know the truth, or enough of it to warrant the conviction that in time he will embrace it all, but wants the power to preclude the possibility of anyone ever again challenging that truth, or the men who implement it...
...He begins by posing the issue this way: "If a scientific analysis can tell us how to change behavior, can it tell us what changes to make...
...Utopias are thus static societies, and men within them, frozen into higher and lower orders, are soon frustrated and bored...
...A second difficulty plagues the idea of "operant conditioning...
...What, that is to say, destroys the controlling power of the environment...
...If they are so judged, we require ethical criteria by which to validate such a judgment and to vindicate their calculated transformation to "better" men...
...If, despite this, they are happy, that happiness—if happiness it be—can only be the contentedness of men who are boring and do not even know they are bored...
...The more we advance, the more we clash with the immensity of evil...
...see also the now classic review by Noam Chomsky in Language, vol...
...and it substitutes for the present reality of imperfect democracy an ideal or perfect, because total, system of authoritarian rule...
...These reflections are reinforced when we consider the further problem of hierarchy...
...Should they adjust (say) the rich child to the slum environment, or the slum child to the affluent environment, or maintain each child in his own or in still another environment...
...some contingencies, some part of the environment will survive...
...In the scientific view...
...It is also to deny what Skinner no less vehemently affirms: that "the environment can be manipulated," that "we can arrange contingencies," that "man must repair [the damage he has done to his environment] or all is lost," that while man is indeed controlled by his environment, "it is an environment largely of his own making," that "the individual controls himself by manipulating the world in 7 Beyond Freedom and Dignity, pp...
...This irreversibility converts Skinner and his controllers into authoritarian, oligarchical men...
...Neil Postman, "My Ivan Illich Problem," Social Policy, January—February 1972, p. 35...
...It has produced a conformist culture made up of one-dimensional men...
...He understood that many (perhaps most) men were not free, did not wish to be free, and might not—in the absence THE HIGHER REACHES OF THE LOWER ORDERS of true understanding—become free...
...One need not insist that all traditions and practices are wrong in order to insist on the right to question them...
...that this is the proper conception of what it means to be a man...
...But in another sense, this closing of the environment may entail what Mosca has called "a real unbalancing of the spirit," an overly careful circumscribing of life...
...We don't need laws and a police force to compel a pilot to pay attention to a defective engine...
...Conditioning, it is clear, operates at this last level...
...Things are good (positively reinforcing) or bad (negatively reinforcing) presumably because of the contingencies of survival under which the species evolved...
...a person's behavior is determined by a genetic endowment traceable to the evolutionary history of the species and by a Gaetano Mosca, The Ruling Class, trans...
...If Skinner really means to apply his many and 258 diverse contingencies—in a degree of control (though not of savagery) that exceeds the practices of even the totalitarian states —to all sorts of people in varying stages of mental and moral development, in diverse social environments and levels of economic and political evolution, he requires an unimaginable number of qualified personnel in constant attendance upon them...
...After all, did not Skinner say that it is the controller who will select goods or values important to him, not to them, and that he will arrange the kind of contingencies to which he, not they, can adapt...
...In effect, there is no way within Skinner's system to correct the misuse of power by the controller...
...And more recently drugs, whether tranquilizers or stimulants, have come into widespread use for the same purpose...
...emerge as equivalent to such therapists as the almigthy Frazier, founder and czar of Walden Two...
...Can there, however, be such a thing as automatic goodness or conditioned virtue...
...THE HIGHER REACHES OF THE LOWER ORDERS history, yet no one will deny its importance —in scientific discovery, military engagements, the resolution of economic and political conflicts, the everyday occurrences of human behavior...
...When a person changes his physical or social environment "intentionally"—that is, in order to change human behavior, possibly including his own—he plays two roles: one as a controller, as the designer of a controlling culture, and another as the controlled, as the product of a culture...
...To be a self-dependent (autonomous) man requires not merely intelligence but also power to resist the will THE HIGHER REACHES OF THE LOWER ORDERS 245 of those whose judgment runs counter to his own...
...184-87...
...He is a stranger even to himself...
...If the elements mentioned by Skinner in the quoted statement—peace, affluence, creativity, decency, self-knowledge, effective management—are what he esteems, then not survival per se but survival of a particular kind of culture is the crucial value...
...Similarly, Skinner, who would use the carrot rather than the whip, requires manipulation (a form of coercion in that it violates man's autonomy) to pursue his stated objectives, and would put that manipulation outside the reaches of popular control...
...So, too, the conception of liberty alluded to here requires special emphasis...
...Education has always had as a primary purpose the influencing of men's minds...
...If they can do it, despite his theory, then his theory is wrong: the environment does not deterministically control men...
...Indeed, they do not even take Skinner's controllers to be scientistkings or authoritarians at all...
...And again: Self-government often seems to solve the problem by identifying the controller with the controlled...
...To explain them we must turn to the contingencies which generate them...
...The right to be Left denies that tranquillity is the highest achievement of the human race...
...But if behavior is to be changed, how can this determination be made without both a power of choice and a sense of justice...
...The alternative is the imposition of an alleged truth on the ground that power is rightfully employed in a true cause...
...The truth is not known, at least not the whole truth...
...It is instructive to note how Skinner, almost as an incidental thought, deals with this problem...
...But how, if men are merely (and deterministically) behaving animals, can they be termed evil or harmful or wrong...
...of the injustices of an existing order and attracted to an ideal commonwealth where disharmony and inequity no longer prevail...
...that such conditioning will, to the degree that it is successful, eliminate the need for painful thought and thereby ease anxiety...
...Merely to state so bald a polarity should rightly arouse the suspicion that these are at best ideal types...
...Some see him as he sees himself, as a humanist, "one of those who, because of the environment to which he has been exposed, is concerned for the future of mankind...
...But he qualifies this too by adding that "the individual nevertheless remains merely a stage in a process," and that it is "the culture which induces him" to act as he does...
...A scientific analysis of behavior dispossesses autonomous man and turns the control he has been said to exert over to the environment...
...So we return to the central questions: What, really, is this thing called man...
...Is it even attainable...
...Bacon's New Atlantis anticipated much present-day disillusionment with philosophy by putting scientists at the helm instead...
...Why should we expect them to act as a class when they lack the very consciousness that is crucial to their existence as a class...
...subject to the same Skinnerian rules) or gestures of their own, perform no unexpected acts, alter no scenes, introduce no improvisations...
...Here many correctly sense what Skinner himself does not see: that Skinner is essentially a mystic, not a scientists or behaviorist at all...
...In Walden Two, he has argued, it did...
...But Skinner offers no evidence that his rulers will constitute such a class...
...To admit rays of light from other moral and intellectual worlds is to encourage doubts and desertions...
...DAVID SPITZ II Surely we must distrust all those who give simple answers to these questions, and Skinner gives simple answers...
...In point of fact, the term "culture" is not a wholly convincing unit of analysis...
...society, in that Skinner explicitly argues against uniformity or regimentation, which "might indeed work against further evolution," and for "planned diversification, in which the importance of variety is recognized...
...IT IS POINTLESS to repeat here the considerations I have already advanced to show that all of these interpretations of Skinner are either erroneous, in that they mistake Skinner's teaching, or warrant condemnation, in that they lead to harmful results...
...No less important, what do they require man to do for himself...
...Italics in the original...
...for even the failure or refusal to choose, which is a surrender to persons or impersonal forces outside one's self, is itself an act of choice...
...Consequently, with the help of science, men who wish to be ("feel") free must seize control of those external forces (the environment) which determine their behavior in order that they may themselves determine that behavior "correctly...
...Since the issue of fairness has been raised, it may be well at this point to insert Skinner's observation that "nothing in the behavioral process guarantees fair treatment, since the amount of behavior generated by a reinforcer depends upon the contingencies in which it appears...
...What must be changed are the contingencies which induce young people to behave in given ways toward their governments.`' Why is this the correct behavior to be induced...
...Modern societies are complexities of large-scale organizations, involving vast and complicated systems...
...In modern industrial society, specialization of function and the division of labor are not matters of choice but technical necessities...
...I know it is fashionable, today as always, for men convinced of the rightness of their cause to become impatient with and ultimately to reject the tedious delays and inevitable compromises that emerge from formal rules of consultation, bargaining, and popular acquiescence...
...It may of course be argued, in strict adherence to Skinner's behaviorist psychology, that man has no mind, in which case we are dealing not with imprisonment but only with nonviolent (and presumably benevolent) control of man's behavior...
...Men move about in expected (stipulated) ways...
...Somewhat curiously, he maintains that "a world that would be liked by contemporary people would perpetuate the status quo," as if contemporary people were a monolithic entity, all feeling content with things as they are and none of them seeking major, or even minor, changes...
...But the reality, of course, is that this ideal has never been realized, and if we are to take seriously the Socratic teaching that equality of opportunity requires, among other things, that all children be taken from their parents immediately after birth and raised in common—and I see no other way to achieve complete equality of opportunity —it is unlikely that the ideal can ever be fulfilled...
...But it is not always simply truistic...
...see also Beyond Freedom and Dignity, p. 214...
...Skinner wants men to be happy and well behaved...
...To be other than we are, to become other than what we are already destined to become, we would have to control the environment that controls us...
...the extraordinary qualities required in the men responsible for such planning (and it ought not to be forgotten DAVID SPITZ that Skinner's planning—both in range and intimate details—goes far beyond all hitherto known schemes for human control...
...He has a right to be right, but not to be wrong...
...To say that what is fittest to survive, survives, is really to say no more than that we shall choose to call fittest that which survives...
...We may grant that American culture can be made intelligible by a consideration of historic forces operating on a restricted geographic scale...
...29 (1969), p. 349...
...In what sense, then, can it be said that there is a reciprocal relationship between the controller and the controlled...
...In the open society all questions are, or ought to be, open to discussion...
...The very fact that Skinner is free to prescribe wholesale remedies for change...
...If the environment is a culture, and a culture is defined as "a set of contingencies of reinforcement" or "a set of practices," what does it mean to say that the environment "acts," that "it does not push or pull, it selects," that it "is `responsible' for objectionable behavior" (e.g., juvenile delinquency), that it can "induce" people to change their behavior...
...He values much of what it already contains...
...They are not, however, without certain elements of plausibility, a circumstance that lends poignancy to the human situation in our time...
...Is this the sense in which Athenian culture (say) may be said to have died...
...The problem," I have already quoted him as having said, "is to design a world which will be liked not by people as they now are but by those who live in it...
...He talks throughout as if his controllers will behave [create contingencies] in a remarkably consistent and proper way so as to bring about his desired results...
...Only in the sense that there may be said to be a reciprocal relationship between the jailer and his prisoner...
...1) Skinner's system is markedly different from current American practices in at least two major respects: it substitutes for the present conditioning from a variety of uncoordinated sources a carefully coordinated and univocal pattern of conditioning...
...They substitute no words (for language, which is "verbal behavior," is 15 B. F. Skinner, Verbal Behavior (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1957...
...It is really no answer to say, as Skinner said in a television broadcast (October 17, 1971) : "We do not choose survival as a value...
...And where man has no choice but to do as he is told, where indeed he is compelled to do this even without being told, he is surely no more than a puppet on a prearranged stage...
...For one thing, if in a given situation uniformity rather than diversity can be shown to promote the survival of a culture, and if that survival is the overriding (or only) value, then not change but uniformity is clearly to be preferred...
...problems...
...Like Hobbes, they want peace and tranquillity and a commodious life, and they believe that Skinner will help to provide these...
...Hence, despite his repeated animadversions against such "mentalistic expressions" as the word "feeling," he can innocently—without embarrassment and indeed with approval—say that a young Chinese follower of Mao may feel freer and happier than most young Americans in doing what he is required to do, if he does them because of positive rather than negative reinforcements...
...If Camus and Silone are right in saying that man is a rebel who affirms his existence by fighting against his own condition, then without equality of power and opportunity, neither reason nor passion will enable him to transcend his miserable existence...
...In the face of the variability and intractability of human nature, of qualitative as well as quantitative differences among men, to assume, as Skinner does, that "the behavioral processes in the world at large are the same as those in a utopian community, and practices have the same effects for the same reasons," is to gloss over the many (and I believe insuperable) difficulties that attend the vast distance between intention and achievement...
...Why, it must be asked, does a man have a mind if not to exercise it...
...But to the extent that it is true those elites are not merely many, they are often discordant and opposed...
...Consider education and law...
...This is why Mill and other writers in the liberal tradition have stressed the crucial importance of democracy and the open society, from which there emerges a certain conception of dignity, embodied in the rights of man...
...The members of the lower orders are conditioned, not conditioning, men...
...Clearly, Skinner's methods, if they apply at all, are applicable only to some (perhaps many, but certainly not all) individuals and small communities, (I must note, if parenthetically, Skinner's curious failure to confront the problem of class and class consciousness with respect to his controllers...
...Nor do we need laws to compel our Dairy Manager to pay attention to an epidemic among his cows...
...If so, replied the skeptic, he is a plucked chicken...
...he must be a discontented and, more important, a self-protecting and self-dependent animal...
...It is more than problematical whether, qua scientist, he knows, or can know, either of these things...
...Where his actions do not directly violate the welfare and interests of others, he should be left undisturbed...
...Not all your scientists put together could guarantee the serenity of a single human being...
...What is needed, then, are power and intelligence and above all the passion for justice that will enable the legitimately discontented man (and others like him who will always exist in our imperfect world) to alter the seemingly unalterable order of things...
...On Skinner's terms, the latter possibility is self-evidently absurd...
...A man who acts auto matically, that is, "unconsciously," without awareness of principles and reasons, causes and consequences, is at best going through certain motions...
...that men should accordingly be divided, This is a revised version of a paper prepared for the Conference on the Open Society, Bellagio, Italy, June 28—July 4, 1972...
...Indeed, given a deterministic doctrine, in what sense can it be said that we choose survival at all...
...Always we know only a fraction of what there is to be known...
...From this perspective, as George Kateb has argued, Skinner is a kind of playwright creating a world of strictly patterned activity...
...Even if, with Edward Bellamy, we look also to equality of income or reward, the problem of differentiated power and the touchy question of incentives (which has bedeviled even the "socialist" countries of our time) remain...
...see also Edgar H. Schein, Coercive Persuasion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961...
...No one directly changes a mind...
...In the real world all societies have probably been mixed rather than pure types...
...But this is not the lot of men...
...In closed societies, no matter how enlightened and virtuous the ruling or despotic class, inequality and degradation remain the fate of the lower orders...
...What then should the controllers do...
...all rulers subject to public criticism and expulsion from office...
...Can these perish or die as an individual may be said to die...
...If these survivors are the fittest, 10 Cf...
...There are, however, considerations that militate against his expectation...
...For the same reason, no credit or blame should attach to this writer for what is said here, or to the reader for his reactions...
...Like Plato, whom he oddly dismisses, Skinner believes that knowledge—his knowledge— is virtue...
...Nowhere was Mill more eloquent than in pressing this point: He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation...
...He does not mean by stability a static order, for central to his teaching is a program of deliberate change...
...It is not his "mind" that is superior to theirs...
...hence we cannot be sure DAVID SPITZ that we know even what we think we know...
...Indeed, the striving for preeminence is so pervasive as to warrant the suspicion that inequality in some form is an abiding characteristic of the human condition...
...Despite all that has been said here, some sensitive and idealistic persons have found in Skinner's theory a plausible answer to their concerns...
...VIIA final word: No credit or blame should attach to Skinner for the achievements or failures of Beyond Freedom and Dignity, or of his life's work...
...V Two considerations more than any others seem to underlie the idea of a closed society: that the truth is known and that it can and should govern human societies...
...By focusing on the internal and anterior causes of human behavior, it seeks not to impose external restraints on "improper" desires but to alter man's nature (behavior) so that he will desire only what is "proper," 1 T John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859...
...Our culture," he tells us, "has pro "Freedom and the Control of Men," p. 47...
...Is there, within Skinner's arrangements, a self-correcting mechanism or principle that will deal adequately with this problem...
...indeed, he knows nothing at all...
...It is precisely this quality that—to revert to the liberal conception of the autonomous man—constitutes the hallmark of what it means to be a man...
...We act, of course, on the basis of what we think we know, and we must do so...
...587-602...
...It follows, then, in the face of the heterogeneity in power, fame, reward, and the like, produced by hierarchical structures, that men at the lower levels will (as they do) resent their positions and strive in various ways to rise above them...
...This is surely a tawdry caricature, both of Mill and other liberals (Russell, Maclver, Dewey, Cohen, etc...
...These are the customs, the customary behaviors, of a people...
...The bad-means/good-ends relationship accepted by Skinner's devotees is equally dangerous...
...It is Skinner's contention that it is misleading and unscientific to describe men in terms of "personalities, states of mind, feelings, traits of character, plan, purposes, intentions, or the other perquisites of autonomous man...
...Workers cannot be freely interchangeable...
...All the more so since the political authoritarianism entailed by Skinner's teaching comes bedecked in fashionable "scientific" credentials and wins the approval of some people who even think of themselves as humanists and liberals...
...A Critique of the Theories of B. F. Skinner There is only one serious question in political philosophy: What manner of men do we take ourselves and others to be...
...And when any man, black or white, resents the superior position held by another man, generally because he believes that the other man is no more and perhaps less deserving than he, we can regret or sympathize with his judgment, but we cannot, if we seek a stable society, ignore it...
...Thus Skinner's theory not merely invites the rebellions of the lower orders...
...But action dictated by faith or circumstance or limited (because partial) understanding is a far cry from absolute knowledge...
...But throughout this long debate one belief at least has seldom been challenged: that man is a sentient and (at his best) reflective creature...
...It is hard to understand precisely which view Skinner holds, since he variously asserts all of them...
...HERE, PERHAPS—and we are still speaking, it must be recalled, of the moral realm—we confront the most damaging element in this indictment of Skinner's teaching...
...5 Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1957), pp...
...But how, in Skinner's scheme of things, can people "like" anything...
...This is the principle of oligarchy, a principle that respects "superior" minds and is contemptuous of the "inferior...
...and we can so condition him only if we understand that the causes of his behavior lie beyond the individual himself, not in his attitudes or states of mind but in his cultural and social environment...
...If we are what we are because of deterministic forces outside our control, we cannot become other 27 From Elie Wiesel, A Beggar in Jerusalem, trans...
...The rules and codes employed in those systems are numerous and by no means unambiguous...
...If, however, man is both creature and creator, if there is some sort of reciprocal relationship or feedback—a doctrine that Skinner also affirms—then there is no determinism at all...
...If, furthermore, all this were true, there would be no point in seeking to change the world (and human behavior) from what it is to something else...
...An influence there may well be: the behavior of the prisoner may elicit pity or compassion and kind treatment, or con 21 Beyond Freedom and Dignity, pp...
...And where men do what they must do, they have no responsibility for their behavior, so that neither praise nor censure attaches to their actions...
...In open societies, despite all deficiencies in institutions, the egalitarian principle remains central...
...and it can only say it was fit to survive because it survived...
...There is, in this relationship, no significant difference between the current world as Skinner depicts it and the world he would create...
...215-20...
...195-207, and "Dostoevsky's Disciples: Man and Sheep in Political Theory," Journal of Politics, vol...
...The right to be wrong, the right to be different, is (in this view) precisely what determines his manhood...
...The fundamental question, or so he would have us believe, is not whether that vision is right or wrong (in any case meaningless terms) but, "Would it really work...
...It is contested by other elites, and it depends for its success on its ability to win the support of the masses...
...Hence domination not merely evades the issue of truth, it corrupts the process by which it might be ascertained...
...But apart from the fact that fallibility also attends the choices of a superior (even if allegedly wiser) power, it is the meaning of freedom that a man take the risk of his own option...
...But if culture embraces entities (or practices) that permeate and transcend spatial and temporal boundaries, then Athenian culture did not die with Sparta's conquest of Athens or with the emergence of the Roman Empire...
...THE HIGHER REACHES OF THE LOWER ORDERS suppose Skinner is correct, that he can do all he claims, that he can make men behave well (be "good" or "virtuous") through habit, without effort and thought...
...In raising this last question I am returning to John Stuart Mill's insistence that the true test of a good government is not its power or wealth but the qualities—the virtue and intelligence— of its citizens...
...25 Here, at one stroke, Skinner imputes responsibility for our many problems not merely to all the thinkers who have preceded him but to the fact that they exercised "thought" at all...
...In their view, America is not a liberal or democratic state but a society ruled by hidden elites...
...I am arguing, that is to say, that by nature and by inclination men are and want to be different, that they associate differences with imputations of superiority and inferiority, and that if they can no longer hope to better themselves they seek to improve the status of their children...
...Skinner may tell us that beliefs and feelings and attitudes do not exist, that only relevant behavior counts...
...There Skinner has Frazier say: The government of Walden Two has the virtues of democracy, but none of the defects...
...If he is to acquire the full stature of a human being, :1 E.g., Science and Human Behavior (New York: Macmillan, 1953) and "Freedom and the Control of Men," American Scholar, Winter 1955-56, pp...
...Or that the mental laws of physiological psychologists like Wundt, or the stream of consciousness of William James, or the mental apparatus of Sigmund Freud have no useful place in the understanding of human behavior...
...Indeed, given this common impact, where did the controllers come from in the first place...
...248 which he lives...
...A particular elite does not always ascend to power, as business elites have learned to their discomfiture in the age of the welfare state, and as labor elites learned in the age of capitalism and are still learning in the age of the mixed economy...
...206-208...
...One is psychological, turning on the tensions and discontents that always attend differences and inequalities...
...the right to be Left...
...Clearly, this cannot be defended by invoking the environmental forces themselves, for these are common to both controllers and controlled and should, precisely because they are the same, produce the same behavior (or values) in both...
...What but his critical and creative faculties separates the cultivated from the primitive man...
...8 To the extent, then, that the controllers can and do choose—and they must choose if man is to be made by man—then Skinner denies his own case on empirical grounds...
...It is a grim fact, they note, that good ends are not always attainable by good means...
...35 (1959), 26-58...
...What is crucial here is his notion that if men can be conditioned to behave as society (or his controllers—and it is not clear that these are always the same, for the controllers, it must be remembered, are charged with changing the culture) requires them to behave, they will be automatically good...
...If a society is to function as some sort of cohesive entity, it must favor some doctrines and practices over others...
...Individuality is a reality, and a value, too...
...Also entailed may be a predisposition, in the name of freedom, to leave men alone, to allow them to pursue their actual rather than allegedly real wills, at least in realms (such as religion) that do not require them to come into injurious conflict with one another...
...By an open society I mean one in which those at the base or on the lower rungs of those pyramids refuse to accept their assigned roles and struggle to rise toward the top, and where the beliefs and social and political arrangements make it reasonably possible for nearly all of them to engage in that struggle, if they so wish...
...This conception of equality, so necessary to the idea of liberty and of a self-dependent and self-protecting man, merits special emphasis as a distinguishing feature between closed and open societies...
...It really is of importance, not only what men do, but also what manner of men they are that do it.17 Yet precisely these are the qualities Skin ner would exclude in the name of automatic goodness...
...the man defended by the literatures of freedom and dignity...
...All of which is not merely a circular argument but is to beg the question, What in fact is the fittest...
...This, of course, requires a thorough understanding of human nature (behavior), a knowledge so complete that (as the skeptical Hobbes said) it would enable us to eliminate avarice and ambition and "enjoy . . . immortal peace...
...But the curious fact (I must repeat) is that if his notion of environmental determinism is correct, Skinner cannot bring about the changes he prescribes...
...In Skinner's system, however, the masses never choose...
...If he knows the former at all, he can know it only as a moral philosopher, not as a scientist...
...14 But all too much can be said against these views, not least that the hope it holds out is of a drab and morally deficient world...
...What, then, is he making of men...
...they can take man as he is and change the world to conform to man's nature and requirements...
...What is he doing with and to men...
...Thus, when a black man today says, "I have nothing in common with whites," we may deplore his statement as a betrayal of his humanity, but we cannot fail to recognize the reality (and intensity) of his belief (feeling...
...His hypothetical utopia, like all mystical systems, is invulnerable to criticism...
...Let's not stop with democracy...
...And if they can do it, we are back of course to the ethical question: survival for what...
...How, in this setting, is it possible automatically, without painful reflection, without, at times, inordinate suffering, to do good (behave well...
...few and transforms them from the controlled creatures they (along with the rest of us) are, into a new ruling class that will now control the environment that up to this moment has controlled us all...
...By manipulating environmental contingencies, one makes changes which are said to indicate a change of mind, but if there is any effect, it is on behavior...
...Those who observe cultures do not see ideas or values...
...Now if the ideal of equality of opportunity had been, or could be, fully realized—if all men had been, or could be, given the same opportunities to reach higher positions—men at various levels in the pyramid of hierarchical power and reward might feel no sense of injustice...
...for it is still the superior who determines, and alone has the power to determine, the treatment that shall be accorded the fellow-member of his "group...
...Man does not and cannot exist apart from community...
...But this does not really militate against the image of conformity I have imputed to him...
...From this point of view, it is less important to argue that Skinner is wrong in his conception of what human nature (or behavior) is, than it is to argue that uncertainty is the first condition of rational thought, and that whatever one's conviction about his own or another person's ideas, it is never legitimate to hold that those ideas are beyond criticism...
...LJ THE HIGHER REACHES OF THE LOWER ORDERS 269...
...Nor does this mean that he will be the straw man Skinner attacks—a fully autonomous creature...
...rather, the controllers (as Skinner has repeatedly emphasized) are themselves controlled men, they are like us, of us...
...B. F. Skinner, author of one of our less genial and more authoritarian utopias,2 and of other 2 Walden Two (New York: Macmillan, 1948...
...This new culture, once achieved, will approximate if not embody utopia...
...269, 273...
...This authoritarianism, inherent in Skinner's thought, should come as no surprise to a reader of Walden Two...
...He should hearken instead to the words of sanity uttered by a madman: Knowledge and pain go together...
...is not monolithic...
...even more, the fact that he believes those remedies not only should but can be implemented —these testify to the relative openness of existing arrangements, both in ideas and political practices...
...In this way not only do the sane sometimes lead the mad but the mad often force the sane to keep them company.° Insofar, then, as Skinner puts his faith in some form of conditioning, and stresses in this context the importance of environment, he offers not a new idea but simply a new technique to improve or more effectively implement an old idea...
...But there is a vast difference between normal (somewhat educated, somewhat socialized, perhaps somewhat conditioned) men and men totally conditioned to do what their controllers require...
...We cannot disprove empirically what is not yet real...
...He says: A serious problem . . . arises when young people refuse to serve in the armed forces and desert or defect to other countries, but we shall not make an appreciable change by "inspiring greater loyalty or patriotism...
...5 But even if we do not, for the moment, press this objection, it remains altogether clear that the point of view embraced by proponents of the closed society cannot be acceptable to any person who conceives of man as a rational and autonomous creature and who consequently wishes our action to be guided by reason...
...it is also to miss the ever-continuing cross-fertilization of both American and nonAmerican cultures...
...But what does it mean to be happy, and why should men behave well...
...He wants men to be "happy, informed, skillful, well behaved and productive...
...As these were open to him, so they must be open to other men...
...the world?] must be delegated to specialists —to police, priests, owners, teachers, therapists, and so on, with their specialized reinforcers and their codified contingencies...
...But the logic of his position is such that should he obtain the power to put his ideas into practice, those ideas and that power could not be reversed...
...THE HIGHER REACHES OF THE LOWER ORDERS 263 and dignity, but "beyond" ("short of") science and rationality...
...No less important, in scorning process for results, he deprecates humanistic values in the procedures he advocates...
...He must be able to protect himself effectively...
...ls Such is the wisdom of our prophet...
...He talks, to be sure, of differences, which he prefers to uniformity...
...Morris Watnick, "Toynbee's Nine Books of History against the Pagans," Antioch Review, vol...
...If, then, none of us is an autonomous man, if none of us is responsible for what we do and say, what is the point of writing, reading, reflecting upon, or talking about this book...
...Man, they have said, is a featherless biped...
...To get that power they would have to break the chains of environmental determinism...
...4 Beyond Freedom and Dignity, pp...
...Would such a society really work...
...He simply does...
...I shall argue against these notions, which I take to be morally deficient, politically pernicious, and unworkable...
...The other is structural, turning on the resentments and ambitions that always attach to hierarchy...
...But the changes he proposes have a particular purpose, to transform the existing order and bring into being a new culture...
...Is he not reducing them to untroubled innocents dwelling in a state of perpetual childhood...
...But surely, unless the controllers are gods (and even Socrates did not contend that his philosopher-kings were gods), they are likely to make some mistakes, they are likely to misuse some of their powers some of the time and thereby endanger the working of the system...
...He offers them a royal road to salvation—led and controlled by behaviorist scientist-kings...
...A citizen is one who rules and is ruled...
...No less than violence, it is a form of coercion in that it compels man to act, or refrain from acting, in accordance with another's will...
...the controllers...
...The problem is to design a world which will be liked not by people as they now are but by those who live in it...
...and what kinds of human beings live in and are likely to be produced by relatively closed or open societies...
...it is fundamentally the same...
...It is also often said that men should not disturb accepted traditions and practices, especially since (as would be the case if Skinner's policies prevailed) they are the "right" practices...
...He moves "beyond" science in that he removes his system and the men who operate it from the self-corrective controls of experience...
...Accordingly, let us now turn to Skinner's conception of ethics and a better (just...
...he can neither choose that design nor know that it is better than what presently exists...
...This is of course the ancient problem of "dirty hands," the notion that good men may have to do unjust things in order to achieve just goals...
...the further fact that a change in any one of these matters is itself likely to produce a change in another, and that this latter change (more accurately, series of changes) may be one of the unintended consequences of the controllers' actions...
...But the fact is that the behavior of such men draws upon such feelings and beliefs and can be understood only in terms of such attitudes...
...If this is so, what people will like turns not on their preferences but on the preferences of the controller, who, Skinner affirms, will (to some extent) "necessarily design a world he likes...
...Still, it is difficult to see why such control (conditioning) is not in fact the replacement of one form of power by another...
...The whole process makes certainty of transmission a very risky business.20 Skinner seems utterly unaware of this problem...
...L. Edelman and E. Wiesel (New York: RandomHouse, 1970...
...It is even questionable whether despotism will "advance" a "backward" people rather than more effectively bind it in subjection, or whether authoritarian controls will "educate" children rather than turn them into mechanical beings...
...Everyman's ed., 1910), chap...
...But in complex societies, what are accounted moral problems are not choices between good and evil—such a choice is so simple (i.e., morally undemanding) as hardly to be accounted a choice at all—but choices between alternatives that are both good, or seemingly good, or sufficiently ambiguous as to require the determination of the good, or mixtures of good and bad so that in choosing to do good we may find, to our discomfiture, that it is also necessary to pay the price of doing some harm...
...Since they have no "purposes" or "interests" but only behave as the environment compels them to behave, what in that environment will make DAVID SPITZ them do the same things at the same times...
...Nor, on the historical record, are the rights of men in the lower orders likely to be held inviolate if entrusted to the higher orders...
...for no man should wish to utter false or wicked things...
...3, p. 117...
...There is a certain recalcitrance in human nature, a grim resistance to the surrender of one's habits and prejudices, a love for what is, a commitment to people and places and possessions...
...What liberals contend is that community is a necessary and ennobling reality, but not the only or complete reality...
...4) To avoid being ;gverned by forces outside their own control, Skinner would have men seize control of their environment...
...12 The problem, then, "is to induce people not to be good but to behave well...
...If economic development is to take place in the "backward" nations, for example, despotic rather than democratic rule may be required...
...Indeed, it was precisely because he recognized these things that Mill pleaded for a more autonomous man...
...We have no election campaigns to falsify issues or obscure them with emotional appeals, but a careful study of the satisfaction of the membership is made...
...consequently, though he may at times act chaotically, more commonly he acts in accord with his feelings—whether we call these passions, sentiments, impulses, or desires— and what he thinks right...
...182-83...
...24 This fascination with utopia must not be minimized...
...All control is reciprocal, and an interchange between control and counterTHE HIGHER REACHES OF THE LOWER ORDERS control is essential to the evolution of a culture...
...103-105, 127 28...
...The messages sent (the contingencies put into operation) —and errors or accidents may of course enter even at the point of origin—are neither consistent nor constant, and so too with the course they follow...
...It is this world, this environment, that will shape (condition) people...
...What they say and do is always controlled...
...It may be objected at this point that I have been unfair to Skinner's portrayal of a viable (better...
...And further: what shall we do if the controllers make a mistake, or misuse their power...
...So the debate has gone...
...Skinner underscores these points in Beyond Freedom and Dignity when, to avert possible misunderstanding, he says: "People who get along together well under the mild contingencies of approval and disapproval are controlled as effectively as (and in many ways more effectively than) the citizens of a police state...
...But as Lucifer demonstrated, not even the most perfect ruler can order the continuance of perfection...
...It is not the benevolence of a controller but the contingencies under which he controls benevolently which must be examined...
...Men must be given room for their own differentiation...
...Hence the inevitable dilemma of utopia: to assure the maintenance of its perfect arrangements, it must preclude orderly processes of change...
...To live is to think, for what but reason distinguishes man from the other animals...
...One might also think that if the environment can be changed, it cannot also be true that all control is exerted by the environment...
...I wish to consider here B. F. Skinner's answers to these questions.' They constitute, if I understand them correctly, an argument in contempt of man, turning on a currently fashionable, though age-old, thesis: that the bulk of mankind is unable or unfit to be free...
...and these, he has repeatedly said, do not exist...
...And where elites compete for mass support, that support is forthcoming only where the masses can exact a price in return...
...The things we call bad...
...All this is familiar enough...
...It has also, however, been taken to mean one's voluntary and happy compliance with the dictates of authority—either because one welcomes the imposition of those external restraints or does not recognize them to be constraints at all...
...by precluding those processes, it only facilitates the emergence of other, disorderly, and (probably) violent social movements...
...Here is what Skinner says: The misuse of a technology of behavior is a serious matter, but we can guard against it best by looking not at putative controllers but at the contingencies under which they control...
...To like something is to have a feeling, or to manifest a state of mind, or to employ what Skinner calls a "mentalistic expression...
...that in consequence of this better understanding and of the further progress that will be made in behavioral engineering we will be able more effectively to condition (control) children, and thus men...
...To realize oneself as a unique person, a man must in some measure be left alone...
...He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties...
...Take, first, the problem of complexity and scale...
...Thus to speak, as Skinner does, of modifying behavior and changing the environment is to ignore the complex realities hidden behind these simplistic terms...
...From time to time, moreover, some men and groups see themselves as outside of (alienated from, often because they believe they are regarded as inferior to) the larger group of which they are allegedly a part...
...Can anything more be said for Skinner's other ethical prescriptions...
...Man is a fragmented being, with many roles and faces, an entire dramatis personae within a single individual, and one therefore who will never be fully known...
...Kahn, ed...
...But this is a false and pernicious statement of the problem...
...But to Skinner they are scientific and readily answerable...
...The argument is thus flawed from the very outset, and becomes all the more egregiously wrong as one traces out its consequences...
...Man is a rational animal...
...Now, however, we are told that these are mistaken grounds of disagreement...
...Open societies not only tolerate but encourage the free expression and examination of "objectionable" ideas...
...The controller is a member of the group he governs only in the way in which an absolute monarch or tyrant may be said to be a member of the group he governs...
...that through a wise choice of techniques what has been increased is the feeling of freedom...
...for to turn citizens into subjects is effectively to bind them to governments and forces he would set permanently outside their own control...
...For well over two millennia men 24 Cf...
...What those crucial things are is properly a matter of dispute...
...He wants to reduce what is (for autonomous men) the agonizing tension between individual inclinations and social precepts by habituating (conditioning) them to the requirements of proper ("virtuous") behavior, as this proper behavior is defined in the society...
...they seem to crave mystery and authority...
...Good things are positive reinforcers...
...Then, unless the child is one of those rare individuals whose intellect and circumstances enable him to think for himself, he will, if raised a religious or political fanatic, become such a fanatic...
...Let us consider these points in turn...
...Together these make for perpetual conflict and occasional rebellion, and require, therefore, a method of resolution appropriate to a turbulent rather than a tranquil society...
...Consider the following possibilities: (1) In heterogeneous and pluralistic societies, socialization or conditioning takes different forms and produces a variety of results...
...This is in keeping with his view that "feelings about any institution depend upon the reinforcers the institution uses...
...But which men...
...hence they are prepared to jettison those procedures when they do not get what they want...
...As Skinner says: All control is exerted by the environment...
...Such men lack all sense of, and must be relieved from, what we understand by moral responsibility...
...4 From this perspective, the issue of closed versus open societies turns on different conceptions of what it means to be a man— not, be it emphasized, man as he is but as he might and ought to be...
...As Skinner puts it: What is being abolished is autonomous man —the inner man...
...It is, after all, one thing to have a single person [and mind?], the scientist-king Frazier, direct a society...
...a particular elite always governs...
...Livingston (New York: McGraw -Hill, 1939), pp...
...The social 252 DAVID SPITZ contingencies, or the behaviors they generate, are the "ideas" of a culture...
...and the fact that such planning must take place in ongoing, not de novo societies, populated by previously (and, from Skinner's standpoint, erroneously) conditioned men, passionately committed to the traditional and the familiar...
...just...
...It operates as a sort of prenatal excision or molding, which is not significantly different in principle from control exercised after the act...
...And if they can choose, they are not only not the subject of deterministic forces, they are confronted by the need to provide justifications for their choices...
...Man, according to Skinner, is a behaving, not a feeling and thinking animals...
...14 (1954), pp...
...266 have been gripped by the Socratic portrayal of an ideal Republic ruled by philosopherkings...
...And if good men are to realize their right causes in a world where persuasion, addressed to previously conditioned (and therefore unreceptive) men, can never be effective, Skinnerian techniques may be the only device to break the bonds of conformity...
...It may, indeed, because such prenatal control is more subtle and more difficult to detect or correct, constitute a far more threatening affront to man's critical faculties than if we were dealing with open and visible dangers...
...Finally, the right to be left alone...
...To this question political philosophers have given a multiplicity of answers...
...I am indebted to the Rockefeller Foundation, to Professor Dante Germino, organizer of the Conference, and to my colleagues at the Villa Serbelloni...
...But what will be his comparative worth as a human being...
...TAKE, NOW, SKINNER'S IDEA of planned diversification...
...What is the essence of a man as distinct from his historical or momentary existence...
...and that, if their horizons are narrowed, their thoughts and behavior are more easily channeled in desired directions...
...No rational conduct is in volved here, no moral choices are made, nothing good—or bad—is done, for such a man knows nothing of good or bad...
...From this perspective, despotism for the advancement of "backward" peoples and authoritarian techniques for the improvement of children have little or no relevance for what Mill called mature and enlightened peoples...
...It isn't, and can't be, the best form of government, because it's based on a scientifically invalid conception of man...
...Destructive because, in seeking only to eliminate those conflicts, it provides no mechanism by which to contain them when they erupt...
...3) Skinner is indeed a mystic, and his utopia is much to be feared...
...But it is not a principle consistent with humanism...
...3) They are bemused, then, by the quest for certainty...
...It is quite another to form [by labeling] police, priests, owners, teachers, therapists, and the like, into a ruling class and expect these disparate persons to behave in a unified way...
...Every society, closed or open, professes a love of liberty...
...This conditioning works...
...He sought, therefore, to set forth principles and institutions by which men might achieve what he believed only a very few superior intellects had thus far been able to achieve —the status of autonomous, self-reflective and self-dependent men...
...we will have been conditioned to behave as the controllers want us to behave, which is to say, we will do as we are told...
...Or, in keeping with a celebrated line in the Iliad, he argues: "Good sir, sit still and hearken to the words of others that are thy betters...
...What is the demonstrated competence of Skinner's therapists—or teachers, owners, police, and priests (and are there really to be priests in Skinner's utopian world...
...Such conformity is not to be achieved through repression, e.g., fear of punishment, but through that "operant conditioning" that will make them "automatically" desire, and consequently act in accordance with, what is socially approved...
...Nor do we require unusual insight to understand that where there are monopolistic (or near-monopolistic) controls of the media of communication, not to speak of the deliberate use of terror, surveillance, and the concentration camp, the alternatives to which men are exposed are drastically limited...
...He says: "Ethical control may survive in small groups, but the control of the population as a whole [which whole—the nation...
...But the former possibility, if true, only returns us to the controllers' problem of choice...
...22 And if one should wonder what is entailed by channels of protest and studies of satisfaction of the membership, Frazier explains that Walden Two has effectively controlled the inclination to behave...
...If a better world means better men, what shall we say of a doctrine that quite literally imprisons man, substituting for one kind of containment a more radical and dangerous restriction of the mind...
...All of which is to move them from "behaving" to autonomous men...
...They are also specific rather than general, in the sense that while an elite may dominate a realm of activity at a particular time, it does not dominate all sectors of the society always...
...Through accident and design, men have been divided into higher and lower orders...
...If it be said that the controllers too are conditioned men, the response must surely be that they are conditioned, if conditioned at all, in a quite different way—not by other men, other controllers, but by contingencies that they have themselves made, in other words, by themselves...
...The variety that Skinner conceives is one in which the kinds and degrees of diversity, and the manner in which they may exist, are the result not of accident or free choice by the lower orders but of deliberate design, by the contingencies of reinforcement set into operation by the controllers...
...If so, how shall we treat him, how indeed shall we know who he is...
...Indeed, the very fact that Skinner seeks to abolish or dispossess autonomous men presupposes that they already exist...
...But what is characteristic of closed societies is that they also mean by liberty the right of the government officially to suppress undesirable views, most commonly on matters of morality and political right...
...What drives Skinner, and what attracts them to Skinner, is his faith—not in reason, or science, or scientists, or even that limited breed of scientists known as behaviorist psychologists, but in a sort of Invisible Hand that will transcend environmental determinism to control the environment that controls us, and in that way lead us to utopia...
...He must be a discontented man, according to this liberal tradition, because, as a perceiving animal, he is aware that he lives in a disharmonious and (in certain crucial respects) an unjust world...
...Such freedom and such equality are the core of what we mean by dignity...
...9 Above all, he wants the culture to survive, for survival is not merely the principal value, it is "the only value according to which a culture is eventually to be judged...
...All other issues—not least the next fundamental question, By what right does any man or class command the services of another?— derive from the answer we give to this central question...
...That, if left alone, he may in fact choose wrongly is a distinct possibility...
...TAKE, FINALLY, Skinner's notion of a stable (though evolving) society...
...Differences of function entail inequalities of skill and (generally) productivity, and consequently inequalities of reward...
...To view the landscape of culture through Skinnerian eyes is to move into a grossly distorted world...
...If, to rescue his case, Skinner would retreat from his mechanistic determinism to the voluntaristic choices of men "intentionally" seeking to remake themselves (or others), he not only repudiates his central doctrine but relies on the foolishness of choice he has consistently decried...
...It is, as I have tried to point out, truistic to say that societies attempt to condition (socialize) their children (and also, perhaps, their adults), and that in some measure they frequently succeed...
...The reality of utopia becomes the death of utopia...
...Without such a consensus, however limited, a society can form neither a nation nor a state but must remain an amorphous conglomeration of beings...
...16 Now it is true that men whose actions are completely unpredictable are regarded as beyond the moral range, perhaps as lunatics...
...There is, of course, no necessary reason for such imputations, any more than there would be if we were talking of the differences between an apple and an orange...
...The right system, the only just system, must have as its prerequisite a mechanism that will enable the lower orders not merely to reach out for their legitimate higher claims but actually to attain them...
...But which differences shall be suppressed and which contingencies chosen...
...To this extent at least, the masses do choose...
...only their controllers are responsible for what they do...
...It may well be, therefore, that Skinner's utopian vision will not founder—at least in its initial appeal—because of scientific and moral deficiencies...
...there will always be the odd person or (more likely) numbers of persons who will stray from the fold...
...How can such robotlike creatures correct unwise or unworkable policies...
...As Skinner would be the first to insist, both writer and reader are also behaving only as they must...
...47-65...
...And this means not that he be given more power than they—for what then would protect the others from his possible encroachments on their right to be wrong or different?—but that he be given an equal power and opportunity to use it...
...It is of course impossible to imagine a life deprived of all choices...
...It is not a choice between two ideal types—authoritarian rule and democracy...
...it must be fought for and, with great difficulty, attained...
...Hence he designs only what he is compelled by his environment to design...
...What is most objectionable here is the notion that conformity and tranquillity are the noblest of virtues...
...This is why Aristotle carefully distinguished theoretical wisdom (knowledge of the truly good) from practical wisdom (knowledge of what is possible in a given situation...
...It is more difficult (though according to Skinner quite possible) to control individuals and small groups of men...
...These elites condition us now—through controlled "information" from the government and mass media, through authoritative indoctrination from the churches and schools, through programmed advertising from the controllers of Madison Avenue...
...I do not believe so, and for two reasons primarily...
...And if accident is likely to play as important a role in man's future, how can he place so much confidence in the efficacy of his behavioral engineering...
...and police (as we know them in what country...
...This is, the freedom to do and say only the "right" things—as stipulated by God or nature or tradition or, what is decisive in practice, by those earthly powers who claim to know, and who therefore claim the exclusive power to apply, those alleged teachings...
...But this is not all...
...Nor, since they are "automatically good" (behave well), can they be discontented men, or exercise— or worry about exercising—freedom of choice...
...Skinner concedes this in a revealing passage: Man as we know him, for better or for worse, is what man has made of man...
...To neglect their judgments, to THE HIGHER REACHES OF THE LOWER ORDERS 267 impose the judgment of an allegedly superior will, is to diminish their humanity...
...1 In his book Beyond Freedom and Dignity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971...
...society...
...In the same way, the contingencies he would schedule cannot produce "a better world," for they will be frustrated by accident, by the unanticipated consequences of the controllers' actions...
...It is often said that what liberalism lacks is a sense of and respect for community, that it sets men apart in isolation from each other DAVID SPITZ and thereby deprives them of their brotherhood...
...Indeed, We can conceive of moral training which is so adequate to the demands of the culture that men will be good practically automatically, but to that extent they will be deprived of the right to moral heroism, since we seldom admire automatic goodness...
...What autonomy means in the real world is not freedom from all restraints, not the denial of socialization (some "conditioning"), but the insistence that where an individual's practices do not militate against the interests of others, his mode of life has a privileged claim to respect...
...2) They are attracted as much by Skinner's methods as by his promised results...
...but if suppressed, that impulse will assume unorthodox and revolutionary forms...
...It is all too clear that under his system there can be no opposing ideas, indeed no "ideas" at all, and no political instruments for change counter to the will of his new ruling class...
...DAVID SPITZ are...
...If he says (as he also does) that the controllers ought to choose one set of contingencies rather than another, to select one pattern of desired behavior over another, he denies his case on normative grounds...
...For not only can we not "know" (we can only behave...
...Skinner thus presents himself as a humble, not an arrogant man...
...254 DAVID SPITZ ses are generally sufficient to meet the problems of the day...
...If a particular means is necessary to the achievement of a "good" end, such means— even though it may entail painful acts, such as the surgical removal of a leg to save a man's life, or the resort to war to save a people from Nazi barbarism—cannot be condemned...
...Community forms him, gives him his substance and identity...
...Since none of us, in the pre-Skinnerian world, is a controller, what in the environment selects a fortunate (and gifted...
...Further, if the behavior of the controllers is different—and it must be different, otherwise there is no point to Skinner's argument that the controllers can (and must) change the world from its present unsatisfactory state to a better one—then either there are different environmental forces at work or the same environmental forces produce different forms of behavior...
...If so, how do you account for the madness with which he misgoverns himself...
...Every society, closed or open, means by liberty at least the absence of alien rule...
...Such a status is not vouchsafed by history...
...The principle of making the controller a member of the group he controls should apply to the designer of a culture...
...III Skinner cannot really be said to have an ethical system, for in an environmentally determined world—that is, a world bereft of conscious choice—men (including of necessity Skinner himself) behave as they must, not as they think they ought to...
...He draws a revealing analogy when he says: "The breeding of plants and animals . . . also requires planned diversity...
...but, he goes on to say, "it is a science in progress, and its ultimate ade quacy cannot now be judged...
...This queer definition may help to explain the incredible designation of Skinner as "Humanist of the Year" for 1972...
...Hence men must be free to discuss and resolve that dispute...
...Moreover, what are "better" men...
...they are merely forms of behavior to be observed...
...Yet he falls back again and again on this proscribed word...
...His notion of variety is not that of the open society, in which men are free to become (even if within limits) what their desires, opportunities, and circumstances allow them to become, but rather of the closed society, in which variety is carefully (and officially) circumscribed...
...He is in but not of the group...
...Even Skinner admits (though typically by overstatement) that "accidents have been responsible for almost everything men have achieved to date, and they will no doubt continue to contribute to human accomplishments...
...Now it is axiomatic that rights are not self-enforcing...
...He wants them to live together without quarreling, maintain themselves by producing the food, shelter, and clothing they need, enjoy themselves and contribute to the enjoyment of others in art, music, literature, and games, consume only a reasonable part of the resources of the world and add as little as possible to its pollution, bear no more children than can be raised decently, continue to explore the world around them and discover better ways of dealing with it, and come to know themselves accurately and, therefore, manage themselves effectively...
...Skinner moves "beyond" rationality in that he does not understand the limits of reason in politics...
...It is possible that he might be guided in some good path, and kept out of harm's way, without any of these things...
...590-613...
...It seeks to control (modify) human behavior by instructing (instilling, training, indoctrinating, manipulating) children in proper codes of belief and modes of behavior...
...This is why Mill and other liberals insist that to be a man one should exercise one's own judgment, make one's own choices...
...Doubtless some things can be said in support of these views: that we will, in all likelihood, continue to increase our knowledge of human nature (behavior...
...To do good (behave well) without knowing what, or why, or with what consequences, and in the face of what alternatives, one is doing it, is simply to do—not to do good, or, for that matter, evil...
...One striking omission in Skinner's book is his failure to treat the problem of equality...
...It is also true, says Skinner, that man's "individuality is unquestioned...
...But science and technology and even the idea of a national state were not sired in America...
...Why is this so...
...Skinner recognizes that environments differ considerably...
...Does it even follow, given genetic and other differences, that the same environment will have the same effect on all persons within that environment...
...And these protests are taken as seriously as the pilot of an airplane takes a sputtering engine...
...One cannot study American culture at any point in its development without taking account of a wider set of (conditioning) influences originating outside of America...
...For if it is true that accident has played the major role and Skinner concedes to it, how can he argue that it is always the environment that determines human behavior...
...As long, then, as differences and inequalTHE HIGHER REACHES OF THE LOWER ORDERS ities of some sort exist—and they will always exist—not tranquillity but tensions and discontents will constitute essential characteristics of the social order...
...A culture is a concept, not a person, and to reify a concept by giving it a will, with the power to judge and direct, is to move not into the science of human behavior but into a realm of verbal magic...
...It is rather persons who make and mold the culture, which in turn constitutes the conditions within which and through which individuals function...
...Skinner's recipe—conditioned virtue—is both ineffectual and destructive...
...182-83, 172...
...THE HIGHER REACHES OF THE LOWER ORDERS i.e., what he ought to desire...
...Even if he does know, he knows not by authority—for as Hobbes remarked, when a man says that God spoke to him in a dream • he is really saying he dreamed God spoke to him—but by observation and reasoning...
...Surely this is an ethical question of the greatest moment, but it is noteworthy that Skinner does not address him 18 See Skinner's article, "Freedom and DignityRevisited," New York Times, August 11, 1972...
...And while history may be said to teach many and diverse (perhaps inconsistent) things, there is one thing it teaches that transcends all reasonable doubt: namely, that the possession of power is dangerous (even if also useful) and that to guard against its wrongful uses is the first obligation of a responsible society...
...But equality in crucial things is a reasonable goal...
...If the values implanted in the controllers' minds are determined by environmental forces—or if, to adhere to Skinner's terminology, the behavior of the controllers is determined by the culture—as are the values (or behavior) of the controlled, on what grounds can Skinner argue that the controllers should arrange the contingencies that will alter people's behavior rather than the reverse...
...To a moral philosopher these might appear to be difficult (and clearly ethical) questions...
...We have already been told that a culture is "the social environment," "a set of practices," "a set of contingencies of reinforcement...
...If so, to abolish them entails a judgment that autonomous men are evil or harmful or wrong and ought, therefore, to be eliminated...
...He believes that contemporary people like the status quo because they "have been taught to like it...
...Doubtless there are further reasons for Skinner's widespread appeal, but these may be sufficient to suggest why that appeal is widespread, and why the grounds that sustain it appear so plausible...
...For Skinner to hold, therefore, that his controllers can both assign men to fixed tasks and also (through "operant conditioning") keep them there in some sort of cooperative action, is to flout all we know of human behavior...
...But the crucial choice, which is the ability and right to make choices, is above all others the distinctive quality of what it means to be human...
...There is no such thing as a completely free and autonomous man...
...No intentional culture can destroy that uniqueness...
...It follows, though Skinner does not draw this inference, that people are often different even in the same place, and may be the same even in different places...
...it Skinner has repeated this tautology in a recent article, where he says: "A practice that makes aculture more likely to survive survives with theculture...
...And when he argues for planned diversification—of which more later—he concedes that the environment even within a nation (or culture...
...And is not the very drawing of a distinction between good and bad behavior (for in Skinner's lexicon to "behave well" is to "be good") an affirmation of morality rather than of science...
...If these latter statements are to be taken at face value, then the environment, the culture, is not some abstract or even concrete thing "out there," which moves as a monolithic entity upon the individual or nation, molding it to that environment's will, whatever that might be...
...He will select goods or values which are important to him and arrange the kind of contingencies to which he can adapt.21 I have underscored certain words in the foregoing quotation to make it clear that what Skinner is talking about is not selfgovernment (or countercontrol) at all...
...The difficulties—the resentments, tensions, conflicts, strivings— are thus all-pervasive...
...Either he is an environmental or mechanistic determinist (which he avowedly is), in which case man is the creature but not the creator of his environment, or he holds (as he also does) that man can arrange "environments in which specific consequences are contingent upon it [sic]," in which case man is the creator and not the creature of his environment...
...I would dwell a bit longer on this problem of the controllers...
...THE HIGHER REACHES OF THE LOWER ORDERS 251 duced the science and technology it needs to save itself...
...We can see that the feasibility of his proposals rests on a morass of perplexities...
...In this sense cultures do not die but are adapted and adopted by later cultures...
...The "right" human objective, then, is not to move beyond freedom and dignity but to secure them...
...If he can do what he claims to be able to do, and if he has the power to do it, then men conditioned by his methods will no longer be capable—as they are now—to make the free choice to reject his system...
...Tranquillity, or the removal of tension, and peace, or the removal (or near removal) of conflict, become the hallmark of Skinner's stable—and if not static, certainly not dynamic—society...
...We live, in some respects, in a deranged world...
...on the basis of some fixed criteria, into superior and inferior orders...
...for the one thing even the best of despots cannot do is to produce a self-sufficient and virtuous citizenry...
...It may or may not be true that America is governed rather than merely (or widely) permeated by "hidden elites...
...But he insists throughout that these issues are discussed "from a scientific point of view...
...If children are to be taught mathematics, language, and "right" principles, authoritarian rather than democratic methods may be the more effective...
...That, he contends, is how they are governed now—with catastrophic results...
...For it does not know what is fit to survive until after it has survived...
...and he cannot know it as a moral philosopher because, on his own terms, it is not merely the environment which does the selecting but it is behavior, not knowing, that defines the human animal...
...It is this cultural or social environment that "can be changed" (manipulated, repaired) to produce consequences that will modify behavior...
...are all negative reinforcers...
...One might suppose that if Skinner's pres ent knowledge is short of what is required for the implementation of his teaching, he would be loath to press his argument as vig orously as he does...
...Again, this is not a scientific but a moral determination...
...It is true, says Skinner, that "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are basic rights...
...all opinions, including—indeed especially—those of the government, viewed with greater or lesser measures of doubt...
...For if it chooses us, we need neither Skinner nor his concerns...
...it ensures that those rebellions, when they occur, will be unmanageable...
...This is pernicious doctrine...
...We are what our environment compels us to be...
...This last statement is of course unexceptionable, but it does not remove the difficulty accident poses for Skinner's thesis...
...It is, I suppose, plausible to say that in primitive societies customary respon 1a See also Andrew Hacker, "The Specter of Predictable Man," Antioch Review, vol...
...In Skinner's view, man is and ought to be—indeed, he must be, for there is no choice—a controlled being, a creature rather than a creator of his environment...
...Equality in all things is an impossible goal...
...How, then, can such men, who are not men but mindless beings, question the policies of...
...Disagreements concerning the nature of man have thus turned not on whether he feels and thinks but on the character of his thoughts and emotions, and on the relation of those thoughts and emotions to his actions: on whether "right" desires and "right" thoughts are the province of all men or only a gifted few, whether man's reason is the servant or the master of his passions (or whether reason is itself but one of the more compelling passions), and whether his behavior follows from those thoughts and emotions or is sometimes in conflict with them...
...I mean here by a closed society one in which inherited or assigned standings in the pyramids of status and power are approved and maintained...
...Utopias of whatever kind are always rooted in a rigid authoritarian mold...
...I mean here no more than that, where 264 diversity and thus conflict are permanent features of the human condition, it is necessary to provide not "a" solution but a method that will admit of continuing (and at best partial) resolutions...
...This is not (he insists) a question of morality but a question about the behavior of those who do in fact propose and make changes...
...260 tempt or hatred and harsh treatment, from his superior, but this does not make them equals or promote effective control of the jailer by the prisoner...
...23 Others (rejecting his world outlook) are at= a Skinner, "Humanism and Behaviorism," p. 20...
...all will be done despite him or ourselves...
...In the face of all this, in what sense can 256 DAVID SPITZ men be deemed to be happy in Skinner's world...
...So too with open societies...
...But for thousands of years men have somehow believed that differences—whether of race, sex, religion, nationality, intelligence, talent, creativity, or any number of consequential and inconsequential things— do and should entail such judgments...
...Now to be free is to be able to act undeterred by external restraints...
...Means and ends are never to be judged in disjunction...
...a subject is only ruled...
...Whatever the merits of their complaints, certain facts are clear: that hierarchy makes for a variety of differences, that these differences entail a variety of inequalities, and these in 262 equalities produce not merely a variety of tensions but also a striving for betterment that cannot (Skinner notwithstanding) be programmed out of existence...
...Why is it more worthy of survival than Y or Z (their) cultures...
...On the contrary, behavioral engineering ("operant conditioning") must prevail...
...He wants them to be not heroic but "automatically good...
...and second, apart from the fact that survival of the culture is the paramount, indeed the only value, what counts is not being free but feeling free...
...then, seeks to make it easier for men to be good (behave well...
...THE HIGHER REACHES OF THE LOWER ORDERS the environmental circumstances to which as an individual he has been exposed...
...I In every society—save perhaps for the "primitive"—there are pyramids of status and power, reflecting differences of wealth and birth, income and occupation, race and religion and sex, capacity and willingness to employ force and fraud, mental and moral attainments...
...Yes, I do...
...But he does not confront the problems that emerge when men impute attributes of superiority or inferiority to these differences...
...Surely accident cannot be explained by contingencies of reinforcement...
...This involves a carefully planned (programmed, scheduled) sequence of contingencies or reinforcements, positive rather than negative (or aversive), because negative reinforce ments not only lead to undesirable consequences— e.g., they reinforce the nagging parent rather than the submitting child— but are ultimately self-defeating...
...It is often said that while every man has a right to speak as he may please, it should please him to speak only what is right and good...
...These remarks may help us to understand the cavalier way in which Skinner deals with the problem of the dissenter in contemporary America...
...People," he says at one point, "are extraordinarily different in different places, and possibly just because of the places...
...In the latter situation, of course, he needs to provide appropriate criteria for his preferences, which leads us again into the ethical realm...
...and the right to be left alone...
...Yet it is surely an elementary psychological truth that such a process of regression is likely to produce just the opposite result...
...The techniques depicted by Koestler in Darkness at Noon and by Orwell in 1984, and those utilized by the Chinese Communists in the "brainwashing" of prisoners, are testimonials to the power of this idea in the modern world...
...Justice, to Skinner, is an empty word...
...paperback ed., 1962...
...IF SKINNER SEEKS to design a better culture, he must know at least two things: that the culture he prefers is indeed "better" and that the contingencies he would arrange are appropriate means to achieving that end...
...For one thing, it does not follow that controls that work over many (even most) people will work over every individual...
...But if it controls us, we cannot control it...
...Both are demonstrably false...
...The logic of Skinner's theory makes it impossible for them to do this, though Skinner curiously believes that they can and should do this...
...The identity "Athens" may not have survived, at least not in the form we associate with classical Athens, but its culture survived...
...That discontent, that freedom of choice, is reserved to the controllers, the new men of the higher orders, about whom, in spite of the awesome duties he assigns to them, Skinner says very little...
...But it is surely an entirely different matter to control (as Skinner understands "control") hundreds of millions of people in a nation, or billions of people in the world...
...But it is not written in the stars that those at the bottom are forever destined to reside there, or were properly put there initially...
...Ineffectual, because it cannot eliminate the conflicts that endanger the stability of a state...
...Robert Jay Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963...
...As our rebellious youths have amply made clear, men do not and cannot really love those whose authority restricts their autonomy...
...Differences of behavior may (probably will) make for conflict, in which case the controllers, if they are to achieve Skinner's better world, must resolve those conflicts by rearranging contingencies so as to produce a harmonious order...
...this is notoriously vague and its reception, by that strange and complex animal called man, often involves a transformation of the sender's intent into a variety of misinterpretations...
...His abolition has long been overdue...
...What do closed and open societies make of man and do with man...
...that his understanding of human behavior will lead always to the "right" controls, the "right" results...
...He seems oblivious, too, to the vast problems entailed by the modification of a complex environment...
...4) It follows, paradoxically, that Skinner appeals precisely to those who would argue men should not be governed by forces outside their own control...
...They are predictable men...
...Above all, if he too is a conditioned man, if he too is subject to contingencies of reinforcement designed to control his behavior, he is conditioned not by other persons—as he conditions others—and is subject only to contingencies of his own making—whereas others are subject to the contingencies that he has made...
...Operant conditioning" is attended by at least two other difficulties...
...Is he not converting them into automated beings or humanized robots...
...Why is X culture—our culture—worthy of survival...
...pp...
...3 "Freedom and the Control of Men," pp...
...But what ought a man to be...
...The man that man has made is the product of the culture man has devised...
...It is even arguable, perverse though this might seem (though not, of course, to a Dostoevsky or an Orwell), that all too many people look to a power in the universe greater than themselves...
...But what lends some verisimilitude to his answers is the undeniable fact that human or social conditioning has always been attempted and has often, in some measure, been successful...
...And Skinner's utopia, like all utopias, cannot be said to be harmful or wrong, for how can one criticize what does not exist and never has...
...Conformity, not individuality (or creativity), is what Skinner esteems...
...This is because the new system, being perfect (or nearly perfect), cannot admit of change lest it lose its perfection...
...Certainly, the ineffectiveness of Chinese "brainwashing" lends little support to the notion that modern techniques of conditioning can effectively reeducate men.26 It requires more than a little faith to believe that Skinner's conditioning of rats, pigeons, infants, and retardates proves his ability to condition mature adults...
...Closed societies generally mean by liberty what has come to be called "true" or "real" freedom...
...The right to be Left is the right to point out derangements and propose remedies...
...The future world is not better or worse than the present world...
...they are interrelated, so that to deal (say) with the problems of the blacks in contemporary America, we must come simultaneously to terms with poverty, education, employment, housing, medical care, family structure, and the like —as well as with (though Skinner will reject the phrase) the psychology of prejudice...
...To put this another way: If Skinner's goal is survival of the culture, and if survival requires that his controllers gain power, then his doctrine of environmental determinism precludes their getting that power and hence of providing for that survival...
...as they might become...
...In Skinner's world there are rulers and subjects...
...Surely even carefully programmed sequences of contingencies will be afflicted again and again by unforeseen and uncontrollable events...
...Chance has played an unascertainable role in human R Ibid., pp...
...Hence Skinner's proposal is self-defeating...
...But what, apart from such impossible (for a determinist) expectations as self-knowledge, can be meant by the survival (or death) of a culture...
...In another view—and I shall here oppose to Skinner only that liberal tradition which may be said to run from John Stuart Mill through Russell, Maclver, and Morris R. Cohen to Camus and the democratic socialists of our own day—man is the one creature on earth who refuses, and ought to refuse, to be what he is...
...Such men, who are not men at all, are clearly incapable of performing Mill's self-protecting and self-dependent roles...
...7 (1947), pp...
...What is curious about this position," to cite but one of our previously mentioned liberal writers, "is the belief that if impartial investigation were permitted it would lead men to the wrong conclusion, and that ignorance is, therefore, the only safeguard against error...
...82, 92, 101...
...Listen again to Skinner: Do I mean to say that Plato never discovered the mind...
...THE HIGHER REACHES OF THE LOWER ORDERS tracted by his techniques, which they see as improved shortcuts of technological manipulation that may be used to achieve their own ideological ends...
...It is science or nothing...
...control the conditions of life and you control man...
...Hence their programming is more likely to be "right...
...to resolve these problems...
...What is entailed is man's freedom to articulate not only the "right" but the "wrong" ideas...
...The question now to be rasied is, How shall we know in advance whether the prescribed diversities will blend together into a coherent unity or be disruptive of that unity...
...But if the controllers no less than the controlled are environmentally determined, how can they choose...
...Skinner excludes choice, holding that men do not in fact choose, that the environment chooses for them, in which case of course it is meaningless to ask whether they ought to choose, and by what criteria...
...Utopia, to be sure, has always appealed to men conscious 26 Cf...
...2) Where a society values (behaves so as to produce) critical and inquiring minds, that is to say, people who go about asking questions and seeking answers, it may be possible to arrange a sequence of contingencies that will bring about (or perpetuate) the very autonomous men Skinner deplores and seeks DAVID SPITZ to abolish...
...For if the state exists for man rather than man for the state, the only justification of a state is not mere survival but progress—understanding by progress a change in the quality of men's lives that will 244 enable them to move from the sorry creatures many are to what they might and ought to be...
...And if it is the business of a people to correct the er rors of government, procedures that enable them to criticize, to participate, and effec tively to remove rulers are vital...
...A few additional remarks, however, may be in order...
...And what does it mean to exercise one's mind if not to reflect upon and choose among alternatives...
...And what is the point of such reflection and choice if, after that decision, he is told that it is of no account, he must abide by the decision of another...
...One is the role of accident and of the unanticipated consequences of intended actions...
...Avon paperback, 1971), P. 52...
...There are no imperfections, no meannesses, no inequities, in Skinner's world...
...If the message employs language (verbal behavior...
...Clearly the controllers, if DAVID SPITZ they could do through "operant conditioning" what Skinner believes it is possible for them to do, must make an ethical along with a scientific choice: they can take the world as it is and fit man into it...
...Skinner confuses here the philosophical problem of determinism versus free will with the quite separate social problem of freedom and restraint...
...Survival of a culture, then, is not a viable but an empty and meaningless value, recommending itself only to those who feel more comfortable with concepts of stability and adjustment than with the more difficult notions of freedom, justice, and equality...
...and that such men behaving in those required ways will be happy...
...self to the issues involved, least of all to the question of what justice requires...
...27 Skinner looks to external (environmental) forces as determining the nature (behavior) of men...
...It fails to take account of the fact that in the long run man is determined by the state...
...and that in any case a social structure has been built "which will satisfy the needs of everyone and in which everyone will want to observe the supporting code...
...They cannot adequately solve any one of them without simultaneously solving all the others, and if, as Skinner proposes, they deal with them in piecemeal fashion instead, he must confront 20 On this point see Martin Landau, "Redundancy, Rationality, and the Problem of Duplication andOverlap," Public Administration Review, vol...
...To feel free may entail no more than one's recognition of this objective condition...
...This last assertion, of course, is selfevidently untrue...
...And these qualities he requires and exercises exactly in proportion as the part of his conduct which he determines according to his own judgment and feelings is a large one...
...This presupposes not simply a community of rulers but of their interests, purposes, shared values...
...He who claims to know what is right and true and good really asserts no more than that he thinks he knows...
...To make a value judgment by calling something good or bad is to classify it in terms of its reinforcing effects...
...If so, it can only be because culture is something that is bound in space and time, in which case no culture can be said to have survived and no culture can hope to survive...
...How, and by what criteria, do owners (of what...
...In "Humanism and Behaviorism," Humanist, July—August 1972, p. 20...
...60-61...
...or they can change both man and the world so that both will be other (and presumably better) than they are...
...He must look not to the forbearance of others but to himself...
...Those actions cannot be termed good or bad...
...Yet it is impossible to escape the fact that the controllers must choose...
...the reinforcers that appear in the contingencies are its "values...
...Men are nothing but behaving animals, and human behavior is the automatic outcome of environmental forces...
...He must use observation to see, reasoning and judgment to foresee, activity to gather materials for decision, discrimination to decide, and when he has decided, firmness and selfcontrol to hold to his deliberate decision...
...In the humanist conception, all men require opportunities for education and growth, all men count...
...but between two realities—the benevolent authoritarianism of Skinner's scientistkings and the inchoate (and wicked) authoritarianism of the political-militaryindustrial complex...
...Skinner cannot have it both ways...
...What is true of hierarchies in the industrial sphere is true of hierarchies in other areas of society, e.g., the political, the religious, the educational...
...They must always be taken together and assessed in terms of the total situation...
...as such, he must be conditioned to behave rightly, not be permitted to act wrongly...
...Through proper environmental manipulation or engineering—what Skinner calls "a technology of behavior" or "operant conditioning"— it should then be possible to structure the environment (design the right culture) so as to produce (control) right behavior...
...But to the extent that the actual world is different from the world he depicts, what he envisions is decidedly worse...
...Nor are education and law the only instruments through which men have sought to control (modify) human behavior...
...Now we did not need a Marx to tell us that men have always been affected (somewhat conditioned) by impersonal forces outside themselves...
...He is certainly not chosen by the group...
...And these actions, in turn, cannot even be "intended," for the controllers can have no purposes or intentions, since they are merely behaving animals in an environmentally determined world...
...Surely, then, in designing the new culture, the needed science and technology will remain...
...One of the great merits of democracy is that it can provide an effective mechanism through which those who live under a system are able to inform the rulers of their experiences under that system...
...The choice before us, therefore, is not between programming and the absence of programming but between two kinds of programming— that of Skinner and that of hidden elites...
...He does what society (or the controllers) requires him to do...
...The impulse to change cannot be eliminated, for while men have limited needs they have unlimited wants...
...always the things we do not know vastly exceed the things we know...
...Skinner himself does not seek totally to destroy our old culture, only to alter some of its practices so as to correct what he takes to be shortcomings...
...Or that Aquinas, Descartes, Locke, and Kant were preoccupied with incidental, often irrelevant by-products of human behavior...
...DAVID SPITZ works denigrating man's freedom,3 has in Beyond Freedom and Dignity, the Summa Scientifica of his life's work, spelled out what man really is...
...But whether that cause is a true cause is precisely what is at issue...
...But the more important key to Skinner's teaching here is his underscored term "planned diversification...
...They object, too, to the arbitrary rules (or what they take to be arbitrary rules) and the irresponsibility (lack of democratic accountability) of men at the higher levels of those pyramids...
...Like the Persian potentate (as recounted in the History of Herodotus) who addresses a group of fellow conspirators, he in effect says: "Let us choose out from the citizens a certain number of the worthiest, and put the government into their hands...
...And surely it is one of the functions of law to control (modify) human behavior, in part through a system of punishments, in part through persuasion...
...11) Beyond Freedom and Dignity, p. 157...
...It has already been noted that the kinds and measure of diversity to be found in Skinner's new society will be determined by the controllers...
...Control the environment and you control the conditions of life...
...268 DAVID SPITZ than what we are or are destined to become...
...People act to improve the world and to progress toward a better way of life for good reasons, and among the reasons are certain consequences of their behavior, and among those consequences are the things people value and call good...
...How, in fact, do we distinguish behaving well from behaving badly...
...And compare K. J. Scott, "Conditioning and Freedom," Australasian Journal of Philosophy, vol...
...And what justifications attend these different understandings and practices...
...Thus Skinner moves, not simply "beyond" (by which he means "short of") freedom 22 Walden Two (paperback ed...
...or in an entirely just world populated by entirely just men, which is to say, Heaven...
...They want not "right" procedures but "right" results...
...Clearly, these are the products of external circumstance, the environment, over which as a determinist he can have had little or no control...
...Consider his idea—if a behaviorist (in Skinner's understanding of the term) can be said to have an idea—of "automatic goodness...
...For by excluding choice from what he clearly considers the lower orders of men, he deprives them of the one quality that would still enable them to retain their humanity...
...they seek someone to whom they can entrust their conscience, someone who will remove the awful burdens of freedom, someone who will give them bread, security, and perhaps amusement, someone who will make them happy...
...It is rather the environment that is above us all...
...Now one might think that by expressing a preference for one type of culture or pattern of behavior rather than another, Skinner is introducing a moral dimension into his analysis—as indeed he is...
...37 (1959), pp...
...and that some version of the closed rather than the open society is consequently the proper (and indeed unavoidable) medium for realizing this principle...
...Conflicts will be absent only in a world where men have ceased to be human, where they have been converted into robots and are consequently "automatically good...
...What Skinner does is to plumb the hearts of those who want freedom but do not want to make choices, who want to feel free but not to be free, by giving them what they want (or will want after proper conditioning) while absolving them of all the burdens —the fears, uncertainties, and responsibilities— of decision-making...
...Among these rights three are of such importance that they merit special emphasis: the right to be wrong...
...But in Skinner's system, apart from an individual's presumed capacity to reveal his suffering as a cow reveals its affliction or an engine its defect, there is no way for a citizen to express his discomfort or to compel a change in its cause...
...Or, if we move from normal to bizarre closed socie 246 ties, that is, to those totalitarian societies based not on some alleged objective truth or binding principle but on the sheer exertion of power—as embodied, for example, in the Nazi and Fascist systems—"true" or "real" freedom becomes no more than compliance with the dictator's intuitive will...
...Yet if we consider the end of morals rather than certain virtuous means, is not "automatic goodness" a desirable state of affairs...
...The "evil," the weakness, the fallibility in man—these are not the products of man's will, or of his "nature," but of an uncontrolled environment that makes us what we 25 "Humanism and Behaviorism," p. 19...
...10 That Skinner attaches his ill-conceived notion of culture to the equally ambiguous (and long-discredited) theory of the survival of the fittest only compounds the implausibility of his doctrine...
...Totalitarian rulers, not knowing or indifferent to this distinction, resorted to terror in the abortive attempt to achieve their unattainable ends...
...All of which -becomes particularly irrational when we understand that many problems are not capable of permanent solution at all...
...Unavoidably, we are back once again to the problem of choice and its relation to environmental determinism...
...To all this we must add: the great technical difficulties in planning a harmonious and efficient social order...
...and if there, why not everywhere...
...One all too obvious answer is that we—if members of the lower orders—will not and cannot know these things...
...Since the truth is not known, it follows (as Mill argued) that men must be free to inquire into the validity of conflicting claims to truth...
...It is one thing to control the behavior of rats in a maze or pigeons in a cage or infants in a carefully constructed box...
...Kateb has commented on Skinner's last book in the Atlantic, October 1971, 122-25...
...that if proper behavior becomes effortless it becomes more certain, and society as a whole will benefit (in the sense that it will get what it demands) ; and that if "goodness" becomes automatic, and therefore less difficult, human energies can be channeled more efficiently into other needed tasks...
...Hence, though it will continue to evolve, its evolution cannot be expected to admit major alterations...
...For the moment Skinner is content to meet this requirement, as is evidenced by his participation in public discussions of his work...
...It is a truism that in politics the truth, in whatever measure known, does not wholly govern men...
...If Skinner's controllers, the new men of the higher orders, in what sense can men of the lower orders be said to control...
...Their internal arrangements are imperfect...
...But he quickly adds two things: first, these are the rights of the individual and "have only a minor bearing on the survival of a culture...
...But this status, says Skinner, has not, cannot, and should not be attained...
...They see how people live, how they raise their children, how they gather or cultivate food, what kinds of dwellings they live in, what they wear, what games they play, how they treat each other, how they govern themselves, and so on...
...What is ultimately good or bad," he insists, "are things, not feelings...
...For 14 See George Kateb, Utopia and Its Enemies (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963), chap...
...But this information is worthless if it has been prearranged...
...Skinner has divided his world into higher and lower orders, and between the two there is an unbridgeable gap...
...And what does it mean to reason if man must then set his reason aside and forgo the right to choose...
...Nor is it consequential if it enters only as a petition or prayer, dependent for its reception on the arbitrary will of the ruler...
...Not to control the environment is in fact to surrender to the forces that now control them...
...he does not possess a plan or purposes or intentions, nor is he governed by a state of mind or the other perquisites of autonomous 250 man...
...17 (1955), pp...
...Clearly, whether the environment controls men, or Skinner's controllers control the environment that controls men, the bulk of mankind remains subjects, not citizens...
...Man, after all—including, presumably, Skinner and his "controllers"— is not a thinking or feeling animal, only a behaving animal...
...What can be done is vastly different from what a scientist-king believes ought to be done...
...Skinner admits that we do not yet have such complete knowledge, that his behaviorist psychology "is not yet ready to solve all our 12 Beyond Freedom and Dignity, pp...
...The more we know, the greater our despair...
...A better world will be liked by those who live in it because it has been designed with an eye to what is, or can be, most reinforcing...
...200, 205, 177, 164, 160...
...Nor can America claim exclusive paternity of its language and literature, art and music, dress, games and manners...
...Force has regularly been employed to compel men to behave in ways they dislike...
Vol. 20 • April 1973 • No. 2
